An activist group called Everyone Hates Elon has taken over two London bus stops with fake advertisements for Meta smart glasses, according to reporting published on July 16, 2026 Engadget. One of the fake ads features Kylie Jenner and uses an optical illusion. Viewed from one angle, it shows her face. From another angle, her face turns into a black-and-white skeleton with the text "Meta: We're always watching." A second fake ad, which appeared in London earlier the same month, read "The biggest advance in pervert technology since the trenchcoat" alongside the phrase "Hey Meta, start filming" Engadget.

The group posted images of the bus-stop campaign on its Instagram account, @everyonehateselon_, on July 15 Instagram. The campaign references a Financial Times report that Meta is testing smart glasses designed to continuously record audio and video Engadget.

Hyperallergic noted that the Jenner ad appears to reference John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi film "They Live," in which a character discovers special sunglasses that reveal hidden messages beneath advertising and media Engadget. The reference is pointed: a film about media manipulation repurposed to critique a technology company's surveillance hardware.

This is not Everyone Hates Elon's first guerrilla advertising action. The group previously ran subway ad campaigns in New York protesting Jeff Bezos' involvement with the Met Gala Engadget. The group describes itself as a class-based activism organization Instagram.

On the product side, Meta recently announced a safeguard built into the hardware of its smart glasses: the company will disable the cameras if it detects that the small recording light, called an LED indicator, has been physically tampered with Engadget. That fix addresses one specific problem — someone covering up the recording light so they can film secretly. But the activist campaign targets a different concern entirely: the possibility that smart glasses could record continuously by default, all the time.

These are two very different problems. The recording-light fix assumes that recording is something a person starts deliberately, and that a visible light is enough to let people around them know they are being filmed. The Financial Times reporting flips that assumption. If the glasses are always recording, the little indicator light stops being a meaningful way to give people a choice about whether they are captured on camera. The bus-stop ads, rough as they are, go after that shift directly.

The "Hey Meta, start filming" phrasing in the earlier London ad is also worth noting. It matches the actual voice command used in Meta's current smart glasses. That means the activist group did enough homework to reference the real feature rather than making up a phrase that sounds plausible. That specificity is what separates this campaign from generic anti-tech protest. The ads target a specific product behavior: hands-free, voice-activated recording in public places.

Meta's decision to build a safeguard around the recording light suggests the company knows that the integrity of that indicator is a trust issue. The question the campaign raises is whether that safeguard is enough when the product itself may be moving toward always-on recording. A safety feature for a tampered light does not help in a scenario where the light works perfectly but the glasses are recording constantly by design.

The "They Live" reference works in another way. Carpenter's film was about a world where surveillance and control were built into the everyday visual environment, hidden in plain sight. The argument the film made in 1988 is the argument the bus-stop ads are making now: that the technology of watching becomes harder to challenge once it is woven into ordinary consumer products. The difference is that in the film, a character had to put on special glasses to see the hidden messages. The current version of that anxiety is about glasses that do the watching.

Meta has not, based on the available reporting, publicly addressed the Financial Times report on continuous-capture testing or the activist campaign directly. The verified facts cover the ads, the group's prior actions, the Financial Times reporting the ads reference, and Meta's recording-light safeguard. Taken together, those facts describe a product category whose permission to operate in public spaces is being actively contested while the hardware is still in development.

The broader context here is worth flagging. When Google introduced Glass in 2013, the public backlash was immediate — people who wore the device in public were dubbed "Glassholes," and the consumer product never recovered. Meta is now trying to normalize a more capable version of the same concept, with reports of always-on recording in testing. The lesson from a decade ago was that the technology worked but the public was not ready to accept it. Whether Meta can change that calculation this time around may depend less on hardware features and more on whether ordinary people are comfortable being recorded as a default condition of being in public.